I am haunted by Josko Gravner in much the same way that sensitive young readers, myself then included, were once obsessed with J.D. Salinger.¹ If I could only just meet him for a short visit, the dim, umbral light that flickers in the cave of this Platonist winemaker might suddenly blaze forth with clarity and illuminated purpose. The path toward authenticity–let’s face it, how can one make wine in the New World without suspecting, nay, knowing that you are a complete and utter fraud?–the true and righteous approach to the Holy Grail of Terroir in the New World, is not, shall we say, obvious. I am certain that one is needful of a spiritual advisor or at a minimum, an avuncular encourager, who will assure one that all of his febrile imaginings and false starts are an inescapably vital part of the karmic Route de Vin that he must tread.
I have made no pilgrimage to rural New Hampshire to see the reclusive Salinger, but have, in fact, made a real effort to meet Mr. Gravner–on perhaps four or five separate occasions–to no avail. He and I have mutual friends in Friuli. They call on my behalf a day or two in advance of a proposed visit; it never seems to work out. He has some tractor work that must be done or a conference that calls him away or wine that must be prepared for bottling tomorrow. (It might be argued that the precise timing for the bottlings of his style of wine, i.e., pre-oxidized, isn’t quite temporally dependent.) I have the sense that if I were there on behalf of the Swedish Academy to present him with the Nobel Prize for Viticulture he would have a need for an emergency pedicure and would beg off.
Josko Gravner is a winemaker in Friuli, who for many years made great–if relatively normative–wines that were routinely awarded tre bichieri by Gambero Rosso, the supremely influential Italian wine publication. At some point Gambero Rosso stopped awarding Gravner any bichieri at all, stopped reviewing his wine, struck him from the record, as it were, and have essentially treated him as a wine non-person. Gravner is loosely affiliated with a group of Italian winemakers who call themselves, Il Gruppo dei Pazzi, or “the crazy guys.” He is a follower of biodynamic viticulture,² a discipline itself replete with arcane and mysterioso practices, though it is clear that Gravner now operates on perhaps a still more rarified realm. He is said to have modeled his current winemaking practices on ancient techniques, including, but not limited to, extensive maceration of white wine on skins,³ eschewal of sulfur dioxide and extended ageing in clay amphorae, interred in the cold, wet Friulani earth.
There is a great mystery as to what becomes of us when we die, but there are also great mysteries that attend our lives whilst still above ground, especially when we are strangers in foreign lands. It was reputed that Gambero Rosso stopped reviewing Gravner when they clashed about politics. Gambero Rosso is or was nominally affiliated with the Italian Communist Party; why did it take them 25 years to figure out that Josko was not marching shoulder to shoulder? Why should Italian leftists be obsessed with gastronomy, anyway? For that matter, how/why is there still a Communist Party in Italy? And how does one shovel grape pomace out of amphorae if they’re buried in the ground? How do you know if the wine is in some sense “ready” to bottle if it has presented itself in an essentially oxidized fashion for the last, say, three years? These were among the many vexing questions the answers to which vinquirying minds needed to know.
There is an apocryphal story about Gravner, which I utterly adore, whether or not it is factually based. It appears that a few years back he summoned his European distributors to the winery to publicly apologize to them for the very successful wines he had been making for the last twenty some odd years. “After twenty years, I have finally begun to understand how to make wine,” he was alleged to have said. “Henceforth my wines will be much, much better.” Even if he never said anything like this, his spirit, or my imagining of his spirit, stands at my shoulder every time I am compelled to make a sales presentation to one of my wholesalers.
A few years ago I asked Daniel Thomases, a close associate of Veronelli, the former editor of Gambero Rosso, what he thought of Gravner. “He’s really gone over the bend,” said Thomases. “He’s making something that one could theoretically drink, but you can no longer honestly call it wine, as we tend to think of it.”
The fascination and mystery of putative mental illness–a great wine mind gone off? Is he really mad or perhaps tuned in on a sublime level that is elusive to us plodding, left-brain wine drinkers and makers, who expect our white wine to be fresh, clear and bright? Might he be a gifted, but perhaps attention-seeking provocateur/show-off, somewhat like Dali, trying to épater bourgeois palates? The radically new (and old) will generally strike us as bizarre and outré but it certainly behooves us to grasp what visitors from another realm are trying to tell us.
You seldom if ever see his wine here in the States. The last time I saw a bottle was in Milan five or six years ago, when Gravner was still selling wine that we would normally think of as “wine.” It was a rather expensive bottle of Ribolla Gialla and all I really remember about it was that it was very concentrated and extremely oaky. A few months back I happened to chance upon a bottle of 1999 Bianco Breg, at Sam’s in Chicago; it is said to be a blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon and Pinot Grigio. It was brutally expensive ($75ish), but I had no choice.
The wine is a shocking but vividly beautiful shade of amber/orange. There is a non-trivial level of acetaldehyde or sherry character present, and a slightly elevated volatile acidity. The nose smells a bit appley–this is a typical oxidation aroma–with a suggestion of orange blossoms and perhaps a twist of lime. But if one really focuses on the wine intently, there is a unmistakable quality of earthiness–I call it minerality–that seems to organize the wine about the mid-palate and is responsible for the wine’s very great persistence. If there is one character that I can definitely identify it seems to be that of humus–the smell of organic matter that has been reduced to its most elemental state. The wine tastes very, very old.
I’ve had the bottle open now for the better part of a week and I will tell you that it is behaving in a very strange way. There are times in tasting it when it seems just utterly shot, lifeless, ausgespielt. But I will taste it again a few hours later and suddenly it seems to have magically grown younger and fresher. The wine seems in some sense to be a sort of Rorschach test of my own feeling-state. If I am brutally honest with myself I have to admit that I really enjoyed the first glass of it, but couldn’t fashion consuming the better part of a bottle with a meal. I am certain that all of us currently walking this earth have different conceptions of an afterlife and some of us will certainly have to have their expectations reconsidered at some point. I certainly had a different conception of what the Gravner wine was going to taste like before the actual experience. I fully expected it to taste somewhat oxidized and was thoroughly psychologically prepared for its lurid color. But part of me certainly had wished it to be more recognizable qua wine–I wanted it both ways–young and fresh but also with the wisdom of the ages.
This morning, I scanned the internet for some information on Gravner (okay, I wasn’t sure if it was Jasko or Josko) and learned several important things. According to a recent article by Eric Asimov in the New York Times, things did get a little dicey at the cantina during the stylistic transition, and Gravner did lose a number of erstwhile loyal followers. But one reads the article and comes away with the impression of a man who very much knows what he is doing and where he is going.
The amphorae are interesting, especially if they are buried in the ground. It may be that the electrochemistry of the wine is slightly altered by conservation in the earth; perhaps a weak electrical current coming from the earth itself is enough to maintain redox equilibrium in the wine and prevent it from profoundly oxidizing, even in the absence of SO2. It is my own belief that wines that are rich in minerals are the only ones that are truly capable of long-term ageing; the minerals act in some sense like batteries in the redox circuit. Efficient, modern viticulture with its emphasis on higher yields and reliance upon drip irrigation in the New World, essentially ignores the role of minerality, and it is not surprising that modern wines have generally radically foreshortened life-spans.
One point that I did extract from the article was that Gravner did not fully implement his usage of amphorae until the 2001 vintage, so it is conceivable that the wine I tasted was simply a work in progress. This allows me the fantasy of imagining a wine–perhaps his wine, perhaps someone else’s–that is untouchable, one worthy of esoteric Taoist masters, who will toast with it on their 300th birthday. I conceive a wine that has seen it all, perhaps done it all and remembers everything. If oxidation is the worst thing that you can do to me, then bring it on. Wines like mortals are creatures of a day; they/we flower briefly and are then gone. We focus on the qualities in a wine that somehow correspond to those to which we attend in life. We delight in the play of the senses and fix on those phenomena that are most obvious–the brightest and shiniest baubles. The “fruit” in a wine is terribly pleasing to us; perhaps it somehow reminds us of the succulence of our brief lives. But if all we look for is fruit in wines then perhaps that is all we will find. SO2 artificially keeps wines alive in the same way that modern medicine keeps us around, but in so doing, are we perhaps missing out on some vital pieces of the puzzle? We as a society profoundly fear death and decrepitude and generally (if we have the means) wish to maintain the outward trappings of youth and vibrant health. Perhaps there are some valuable life lessons to be learned in wines made by the group of crazies. It is interesting to contemplate both a life and a wine that seeks to focus on those mysterious elements that remain resolutely fixed, as hard as granite, immortal.
Notes:
1) This is a rather precise analogy. The alienated, if self-absorbed young readers felt grossly misunderstood by their peers (phonies!) and by relevant authority figures; in my case this would be Mr. Parker and The Wine Spectator.
2) Biodynamic viticulture is uniquely suited to aid in the discovery of terroir; its practice allows the vine to become more self-regulating and to explore the soil more deeply, the better to extract everything it requires to flourish and express itself. Biodynamic practice also greatly abets the “mineralizing” process by which a healthy soil microbial population exists in symbiotic association with the vine, actively transporting minerals into its root system.
3) This practice is utterly contrarian with respect to modern white “reductive” or oxygen-excluding winemaking. Grape skins contain astringent substances called phenolics, which are in fact antioxidants, so one might imagine that a healthy concentration of them would inhibit oxidation (as is the case with red wine). But in fact, if your white wine contains a heavy phenolic load, it will, in fact, turn brown (or perhaps pink or orange) rather sooner than later. This is a bit counter-intuitive.
Randall Grahm is the mind behind Bonny Doon Vineyard.
http://www.bonnydoonvineyard.com/
Photo by Alex Krause